Malone was way better than Enes Kanter. But at age 25 he was not much better on offense than Enes Kanter, and he was also getting set up by one of the 3 or 4 best point guards whoever lived instead of Jarret Jack and friends.

I get why people that focus almost entirely on efficiency think that, but I disagree. Malone’s role was much larger than just scoring under the basket like Kanter.

Part of the “formula” for evaluating a player’s contribution and skill has to be usage and role. It’s understood that the defense is going to force the offense into some shots it would rather not take. Someone has to take those lower efficiency shots. If they were distributed somewhat equally among each of the players, they could be ignored. But to some degree they are distributed according to each player’s skill at making them. Kanter takes almost none of them because he’d make them at such a low rate it would become a terrible shot and instead of just one the team would prefer not to take. So his efficiency is not comparable to someone with a more complete game taking a wider variety of shots “out of necessity”.

On the flip side, there are some players that make bad decisions and take some bad shots by choice. Those are the guys that should be penalized a bit extra for their lower efficiency.

As far as I can tell, there is no easy way to measure all these things. All you can do is watch how often a player is forcing up some garbage when he didn’t have to take vs. a player being called upon to create a difficult shot because he had to. Then you can sort of weigh it all in your evaluation.

Bob, horrible NBA franchises are horrible because they suck at evaluating NBA players.

Ummmm…. all 30 franchises had a shot at him and none other than the Knicks thought he was worthy of $ 3,000,000 a year, so no one thought he was a starting caliber player other than LOL Phil..

And , of course you never addressed your original point about him being better than average starter. I listed 15 centers who are demonstrably better, thusly he can’t possible be a better than average starter. I could have listed others quite easily.

And of course, then you went to the tried and true straw man argument saying GS could win a championship with KOQ starting. Wonderful!!!! They would likely be the favorite to win the title with Luke Kornet starting FFS!

Neither of which have the slightest to do with whether KOQ is an above average NBA starter…………

Frank doesn’t have to play point guard, though. If he turns out to be a good point guard I’ll be surprised, but he could wind up as a SG or SF-hes 6’5? or 6’6? with a huge wingspan and by the time he’s 23 he could be 20-30lbs heavier

Yeah, I mean, this is basically what I’m saying. Seems like it might be a waste of time trying to develop this dude into a point guard, and it might be pretty misguided to think of him as the point guard of the future. I can see him developing into a Scottie Pippen-type player, a guy who is a major pain in the ass on defense, can knock down perimeter shots and give you some secondary playmaking.

I mean, whatever, try him out at point guard for a while I guess, but it just seems like there’s a different and better path available for the kid.

I’m pretty sure there’s plenty of players who came into the league and improved their handle from good to great or from bad to good see: every top 20 player in the league who plays 1-3, basically. Steph, Harden, LeBron, KD, Giannis, Oladipo, Kawhi, even Otto Porter.

How many though have gone from “atrocious” to “good enough to play PG in the NBA?” We’re talking a massive improvement that Frank would need to make. His handle is that bad.

Another amazing Players Tribune piece, this one by Steve Francis.

It’s not even worth talking about those Magic years, and it’s definitely not worth talking about those Knicks years. That part of the story is like the end of Goodfellas, when everybody’s getting jammed up and ratting on each other and they’re driving around looking up in the sky for police helicopters. It was a mess, man. I got to both of those teams, and it takes you like five minutes of being in the locker room before you realize: Nope. No wins here.